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Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

blog.interviewing.io

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Re: Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

#41

Post by amorphid »

kchoudhu wrote: post #33
fecak wrote: post #5

When writing LinkedIn profiles for my resume and coaching clients, I advise them to turn endorsements "off". Under the Skills section is a "Adjust Endorsement Settings" listing that you can click to turn it off. Endorsements tend to be just extra noise with all those pictures, and on many profiles there is rather important information (education, projects, etc.) below the skills section. You don't want your reader ge…

Serious question: what exactly does a resume coach do? Do they just maintain a good resume for me?

Having previously spent 8 years as a technical recruiter, and now working as a Sr. Software Engineer, I can say generally speaking that dev resume should be general enough that anyone in the recruitment pipeline should be able to look at it, and make enough sense of the information that they could make a reasonable decision about whether interviewing you for a given position would feel like a good use of time.

I'd hope a resume coach would help work towards selling yourself to all parties involved in considering you for a position you'd actually want.

Re: Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

#42

Post by mendicantB »

Your analysis is extremely flawed.

I really appreciate your sharing the data with us and I like your service. But, this is a poorly done and a far from subtle plug of your business at the cost of LinkedIn.

1) Technical ability vs # of endorsements

Jesus. Hiding stats that you don't like through aggregations? And please read up on Simspons Paradox, which is clearly the case here just by looking at your plot. Try a basic t-test, or rather some statistical rigor, the next time you try to make conclusions from data.

2) Most endorsed vs Language of Choice

As pointed out, this is not the way to frame your problem. By obfuscating what's happening in your histogram (which isn't technically constructued right either) you are again hiding what you dont like through aggregation. By the way, language matters greatly here, and you'd have benefitted by standardization.

3) Your conclusion

"After running some significance testing, though" and not posting your results or methodology, which is at best questionable after reading your analysis.

Again, I enjoy your service, but blog posts on technical ability that are ironically lacking in technical ability don't really make me want to come back.

PS: A little birdie told me that endorsements are quite strong in predictive power for jobs :)

Re: Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

#43

Post by kevinwang »

leeny wrote: post #21
kevinpet wrote: post #18

I read these articles until I get to the first major methodological problem. In this case, it is this claim: "It turns out that people’s interview language of choice matched their most endorsed language on LinkedIn just under 50% of the time, so, you know, just slightly worse than flipping a coin." That would only be true if there were only two programming languages.

We thought of that too and tried to see how often people were endorsed for their language of choice vs. their most endorsed language. Keep reading? (You can scroll down to where the gray histogram is.)

Sorry, I don't understand the histogram at all either.

Re: Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

#44

Post by kevincennis »

austenallred wrote: post #27

Just as a test I added "laughter yoga" as one of my skills to my LinkedIn profile. So far it's received 5 endorsements. Proof: https://www.linkedin.com/in/austenallred/

At the time of this writing, I have been endorsed for the following skills:

Fly-bagging (10) Squirrels (10) Walking (8) Fierce Conversations (9) Rhinoplasty (2) Puns (3)

Re: Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

#45

Post by JumpCrisscross »

jplasmeier wrote: post #17
yellowbeard wrote: post #10

Not sure linkedin really cares if the endorsements are accurate or not. I heard endorsements were / are massively successful at re engaging users, which is the real aim of the product.

My experience has been that my friends and I troll each other by submitting endorsements for irrelevant things like "Microsoft Office" or "Public Speaking." I usually spend a few minutes on LinkedIn when this happens, so this is consistent with your point.

Huh. We sent straight to "whale fondler" and "yogurt cheffing" [sic]. Guess that's finance for you.

Re: Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

#46

Post by nickbauman »

wickedlogic wrote: post #22
nickbauman wrote: post #4

I've been endorsed for sarcasm on linked in. When friends want to tease, we endorse each other for things like ms-dos and j2ee it's beautiful.

"Healing Touch" is another fun one.

Ima steal this one. Too good.

Re: Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

#48

Post by msoad »

LinkedIn is very useful to keep a list of past and current colleagues and touch base with them in case you need to.

Instead of deleting my LinkedIn account to get rid of recruiter spam, I deleted my entire history. My profile is just my name and my photo. That way I can expand my network of colleagues without getting bombarded with spam.

I highly recommend doing this!

Re: Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

#50

Post by taway_1212 »

ben1040 wrote: post #8

I've been considering just deleting my LI account. It essentially has just been a sink for terrible recruiter mail; in 12 years of having an account I don't think I've once received any sort of actionable message through it. I've also turned off the endorsements because I was just getting driveby endorsements for things like J2EE. Is there a job-search downside to deleting your account, provided you have a decent Goo…

It's not too hard to change LI privacy setting to basically never receive recruiter spam.
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